US President Donald Trump’s “restoration” of the reflecting pool that stretches between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument has been dogged by questions over cost and now by the president’s claims it has been vandalised.
This failure to bend nature to his will has been described as an “irresistible metaphor” for his critics.
The landscaping of Washington, including the reflecting pool, builds on a tradition of organising nature into orderly lines and geometric shapes. Nature is shown as subservient to human control, demonstrating the power of garden designers and engineers, as well as princes and politicians.
This approach dominated Western European garden design for several centuries. But nature did not always play along.
Behind the scenes of many grand landscaping projects we can find failures, rivalries and hypocrisy that remind us that nature is difficult to master.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Water wars and papal rivals
In 1598 Italian Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini was given some land in Frascati, southeast of Rome, by his uncle Pope Clement VIII. He began construction of a grand villa, partly funded by his access to papal revenues. It was intended as a “retreat” from Rome’s oppressive summers.
But the designs were also intended to be magnificent displays of Pietro’s wealth and his control of nature. Pietro based his designs on prototypes of antique villas; this was meant to connect him with the great villa builders of the Roman empire.
The main feature of the villa is an artificial cascade that tumbles down the hill, through fountains of increasing size, and culminating in an enormous water theatre, larger than the villa itself.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence., CC BY
The amount of water needed to power so many fountains was difficult to find. Pietro sponsored searches for new water sources, repaired ancient aqueducts and built new conduits to channel water to his villa, and then to neighbouring towns.
This means the water features announced his wealth, and his control of the human resources needed to undertake large infrastructure projects. Pope Clement VIII is said to have complained that the villa was not worth as much as the water itself.
Yet it came at a cost to local people, with the town of Frascati complaining they went for days without water while it flowed freely into the papal estates.
Shortly after the death of his uncle, and the very short tenure of his successor Leo XI, a new pope (Paul V Borghese) had shunned Pietro and he retreated to his archbishopric in Ravenna.
The new pope’s nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese – who saw himself as Aldobrandini’s rival – immediately began building his own villas at Frascati. His uncle (the new pope) awarded him the major share of water that flowed to Frascati, leaving the Aldobrandini fountains dry.
So intense was the rivalry that when the pope visited and saw the water still flowed into the Aldobrandini fountains, he tried to get Pietro’s architect executed.
Armies redeployed to help with landscaping projects
In the gardens of the palace of Versailles in France, water needed to power the vast number of fountains was a constant preoccupation.
It absorbed massive amounts of money from the royal purse. Water was so lacking that often fountains were turned on and off as the king walked around the garden. The extremes to which King Louis XIV would go in pursuit of the ideal garden is illustrated by a doomed project to bring water from the Eure River to Versailles.
The military engineer Sébastien Vauban brought in soldiers, with reportedly more than 20,000 working on the project over the next few years, to build the aqueduct required for the project. The wet and cold conditions in the valley meant many rapidly fell sick.
An epidemic also killed many soldiers. The project was eventually abandoned, but not before it had drained a sizeable proportion of the total cost of building Versailles.
Naturalistic gardening and moral hypocrisy
As a final example, we might look to the “naturalistic” landscape gardens popularised by English designers in the 18th century.
In their minds, gardens like Versailles were emblematic of the tyranny of absolutist regimes that aimed to dominate both citizens and nature. The “naturalistic” English gardens instead symbolised liberty.
Yet in reality, these too were artificial landscapes that required expensive and often destructive reshaping of nature.
This included things such as moving mature trees in large numbers to create more pleasing arrangements.
The author Jonathan Swift despaired when a neighbour destroyed his woodland grove by carrying off all his trees while he was away. For Swift, this act of vandalism was also an example of everything that was rotten in gardening. He was sceptical – disgusted, even – by the hypocrisy of aristocrats and politicians who tended to their gardens, supposedly designed “in harmony with nature”, while ignoring the suffering of the poor who were starving.
Nature’s triumph
The landscaping of the US capital has its roots in both the magnificent vistas of princely gardens like Versailles, and the libertarian ideals of naturalistic English gardens.
So perhaps the current failure to control the “blueness” of the reflecting pool is just one more example of nature’s triumph over the hubris of those who seek to dominate it.
